I recently worked with baritone Robert Brandt and mounted a performance of these Birdsongs.

“While living in Michigan, the thick deciduous woods had a way of creeping into my mind. The many birds who lived there unwittingly (or not!) made it into my prose, and after a few years I realized I had handfuls of poems about various species and my interactions with them. I’m intrigued by the mysterious nature of this particular collection of words and subjects that I did not initially intend to make and realized I had only in retrospect. Here are only a few of them, collected and composed into a cycle, each giving glimpses into what these birds revealed to me in and around the majestic forests of the Midwest.

Performed by Robert Brandt (baritone) and Barbara Allen (piano). Jan. 29, 2015.”

1.

When wind
And crescents wax
And bring
The earth to blush,
Arbor silhouettes
Wave in gray
And stoic wonder
Between
Land’s terrestrial breast
And heaven’s astral shield

2.

I want to see the lights
The voices of the stars
Transmitting
To my pale, shuttered eyes
They do not speak or sing,
But hum
Through the black
And aching cosmos
Till their stream of constant
Urgings, flickering and rarefied
By years of space and light
Autonomously guide and find
My seeing ears and hearing eyes

I want to hear them
Now, and then
I want to see them
Humming

3.

Drenched and drowning
in the sunset’s creamy
bliss, I drift
towards the sea
and clutch my heart.
For all this happens
flowing in the masterpiece
of evening’s swirling palette,